


words can be like knives (they can cut you open)

by weird_bird (2weird4)



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Banter, Gay Mutant Road Trip, Getting to Know Each Other, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-01
Updated: 2016-12-01
Packaged: 2018-09-01 18:58:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8634193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2weird4/pseuds/weird_bird
Summary: “Insensitive polyglot.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for vague allusions to the Holocaust, starvation, and violence.
> 
> Title from ["Bloodstream" by Stateless.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIJHg1XWR7o)

While Charles sprawls comfortably back in the motel bed, shirt off and book open in his lap, Erik, of course, remains alert.

When Erik does sit loosely, it’s all false. He’s still keenly attuned to every last movement in his surroundings, muscles taut, at the ready for whatever the universe may fling at him next.

Charles, though, leans back on his elbows as though he knows it all already, some flawed marble-curved deity, freckles and ego and ease.

He’s shirtless now, propped untidily on an elbow, a characteristically messy book open in his lap. It’s been stuffed full of wilting bookmarks and even more paper has been clipped to its pages, not to mention the blue scrawl hemming its margins. Water-warped, dimpled, too, by enthusiastic fingers. 

Nothing Charles loves goes without his marks.

Erik sits upright on the ugly motel carpet at the foot of his ugly motel bed and stares at the dagger-angular corners of his new paperback. The sharp fresh paper smell hits the roof of his mouth and the bedcovers poof against his back and it’s all useless sensory detail he would give an arm to go without at the moment. 

Surely no one else can find leisure so difficult.

Certainly not Charles, who chooses now to interrupt Erik, who has been fiercely preoccupied with not reading a single word. Sounds like he isn’t making progress, though, by the extra petulance that colors his complaint. “No matter how many times I try to read French, I’m absolute shite at it. I can do the obligatory boarding school Latin– “

Smirking, Erik glances up at him, then back down to the page.

Charles leans over and ignores Erik’s instinctive tensing when he thumps the back of his head with the book. “Insensitive polyglot.” The accusation idles in his plush accent. “You speak how many languages?”

“English,” Erik drawls and gives the book up for good. After he closes it with pointed care, he meets his eyes properly.

Annoyance and raptness sit together in Charles’s face. He waits, doesn’t speak. For once. There’s a reason Erik values a good weighty pause.

“Polish,” he says, remembering shaping it with cracked lips, not with pride but with dull relief when he received a response. “German.” That, he remembers less speaking and more having it shouted at him, whispered in his ear, heavy in his heart and empty in his stomach. Even the softest of languages would have wielded blade and fire and pain under those tongues. “French. Spanish.” His eyes close for a moment. “Yiddish.”

Charles’s eyes narrow. No doubt, he’s been capturing each pistol-pulse of memory and feeling from Erik’s mind. Erik has dissuaded himself of the illusion that Charles keeps out entirely. At least Charles mostly lets him maintain the illusion of armored privacy, and he would be the first.

To none of these, though, does Charles respond. Instead, he flops back on the bed, book held up above his head in outstretched arms. Incredibly irrelevantly, he sighs, “Oh, the literature you must be able to access.”

With great skepticism, Erik’s brow knits. That is so far from the point that he can’t even respond.

Stories in books were set points in his life. They had already and never happened and would happen again every time he thumbed them to the fore even when his own life vacillated wildly, a pendulum of black and red, bad and worse. He could find surer hiding places in the midst of metaphor than in any dingy corner his body could squeeze into for an hour’s respite.

To read a book is to breathe free. Literature feels a lot like love. But languages are labor, a craft at most. A tool, not an ornament.

Erik remembers belatedly that Charles had actually started a conversation and presumably, has been carrying it on without him. “–approximate meanings with it, but directly drawing on the thought loses the lyricism of the language. Telepathy has no regard for the art of expression. And the ability extends to neither reading nor writing.” He scowls down at the book and taps it. “Pity I can’t read your mind,” he tells it.

Endeared before he can stop himself, Erik snorts, head tipped back. “For the best. With how you’ve treated it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the thoughts it harbored towards you were less than pleasant.”

Charles raps Erik’s forehead with the corner of the book. “Your mind…” He taps a single fingertip on his temple. A light touch, only bold because he thinks he’s been given permission to do so–he hasn’t, but Erik doesn’t rescind it now. “Its compartmentalization is remarkable. Different languages for different thoughts with little intermingling. You see almost everything starkly separated.” The finger draws an imaginary grid over his hair. “Steel lockboxes, if I were to pick something substantial to describe it.”

He hates it, really, Charles telling him about himself. As his fingers flow over the sides of his face, though, he doesn’t bat his hand away.

“Your childhood memories are all Yiddish,” Charles breathes to him, and he once more has to screw his eyes shut. Taking the hint, he switches tracks slightly. “Aren’t you fascinated by language?”

“I find it useful,” Erik allows. He opens his eyes to stare at the floral wallpaper.

Appalled, Charles actually makes a little sound. “Language is so much more than that. For me, it’s so inextricably intertwined with thought. It literally and figuratively defines us.” Erik doesn’t have to look; he can hear his exuberant expression. “And it’s beautiful. It’s the best invention of man.”

“I could make a strong argument for the wheel,” Erik says because he know it’ll pick at him. “I could see why you wouldn’t when you have no idea what to do behind it.”

“Cheap shots at my driving? Now?” He laughs and his tongue flicks out at his lower lip.

“Is this argument a particularly auspicious occasion? Or is it National Cut Charles a Break for Near Murder-Suicide by Motor Vehicle Day? Because you should know I don’t observe that holiday.”

Charles laughs again. The intimacy of the moment doesn’t break, but it spins out airily. Leaves Erik a little more room to breathe.


End file.
